How the Incarnation affirms the Arts.

I just finished reading "Lewis Agonistes*: How C.S. Lewis Can Train Us to Wrestle with the Modern and Postmodern World." This book is a valuable resource for every Christian who wants to engage the World with the truth of the Gospel.

In one particular inciteful jaunt, Markos attempts to spell out how the Incarnation (i.e. the Logos becoming flesh) justifies and affirms the arts.

"As the Catholic doctors of the ancient and medieval church were busy demonstrating the polysemous ("many signs) nature of Scripture, the theologians of Eastern Orthodoxy were equally busy endowing the visual arts with a similar weight of earthly and divine meaning. As anyone who has ever studied the history of Orthodoxy or spent time in an Orthodox Church quickly learns, icons are central to the theology and worship of those who look to Constantinople rather than Rome as the spiritual center of their faith. I suppose the simplest definition of an icon would be "a pictorial representation of Christ, Mary, or one of the saints." However, for Eastern Orthodox Christians (wheater they be Greek or Russian or Armenian), icons have always meant a great deal more.

The iconis a crux, an axis, a nexus at which physical and spiritual, temporal and eternal meet. At the heart of Orthodoxy as at the heart of any true Christian church lies the twin mysteries of Incarnation - the belief that Jesus Christ was fully man and fully God, and the Resurrection - the belief that Jesus Christ rose bodily from the dead. The icon testifies to these sublime truths. As man and God meet, historically, in the person of Christ, so do the human and the divine meet, symbolically, in the physical depiction either of Christ himself or of a fallen man made holy (saint in Greek means "holy") through life in Christ. As Jesus effected the redemption and glorifiction of the flesh through his bodily resurrection (indeed, in Orthodox churches Christ still bears the stigmata he won on the cross), so the icon is a mute but powerful witness to the fact that physical matter can bear and contain divinity and that the natural elements of this world, though subject now to futility, will one day be brought to perfection (Romans 8:18-23).

The icon is a way station, a meeting ground where past, present, and future realities converge. The Christian who stands before an icon and notes the elongated fingers, the strange olive sheen of skin, and the oddly shaped features like a face seen through flickering candlelight is reminded that at a percise moment in history God entered our world, and by making the invisible God visible, made possible all symbolic art that attempts to capture phsically a reality that is spiritual...

The icon does not, of course, embody divinity in a full and perfect form - only Christ does that. Rather, it is the very fact that God did take on flesh in the person of Christ that empowers the arts and enables them to strive toward the divine. As intimated above, Christ, by allying himself with our natural, fallen world of signifiers run amok, baptised physical matter as a fit receptiacle for divine meaning and presence. This is why the New Testament, though it continues to forbid idolatry in all forms, does not repeat the specific Mosaic commandment against graven images. If Christ can become flesh without "polluting" his divinity, then it is permissible for human beings to paint and sculpt images of the Incarnate Christ. For the Muslim, of course, the very thought that God would take on flesh is the greatest of heresies: a fact that explains why the Muslims are the most unapologetic of iconoclasts (they do not allow any kind of representation, even of the prophet Muhammad).

Indeed, any Christian defense of the arts must finally rest on the Incarnation, that most slippery of doctrines." (Pgs 126-128)

*Agonistes means "one who wrestles"